


Five Times James Encounters 007 and One Time 007 is Him

by Castillon02



Category: James Bond (Classic movies), James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond - All Media Types, James Bond - Ian Fleming
Genre: M/M, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 19:57:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20013955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: One of James’ earliest memories was of sneaking away onto the beach in the Jamaican dusk.





	Five Times James Encounters 007 and One Time 007 is Him

**Author's Note:**

> For 007 Fest 2019, inspired by the Craig!Bond/Classic!Bond prompt. I took inspiration from the Doctor No and OHMSS novels as well as the Bonds from the movies.

1) 

One of James’ earliest memories was of sneaking away onto the beach in the Jamaican dusk. His parents were going to watch the news and be disgustingly tedious, they had told him, so he might as well go and have some dessert down in the children’s lounge of the hotel they were staying at. 

(Watching the news, he realized later, was definitely their code word for other adult activities.) 

James liked the salty taste of the ocean much better than the sickly-sweet syrup of the coconut ice in the children’s lounge. It wasn’t difficult to slip around the attendents and find the sand and the sea instead of the other children. 

While he was there, he also found the most beautiful woman in the world. She rose up out of the surf like a goddess, her blonde hair flipped back and dripping, her bronzed skin glistening beneath a white bikini. She had a knife in a belt at her waist and a shell in her hand. “James!” she called out, and she waved. 

For one incredible moment, James thought she meant _him_ , and he waved back. 

Then he heard a low chuckle and a man’s hand dropped onto his shoulder.

James startled. Normally he had keen ears, but he hadn’t heard the man walk up behind him. 

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” the man asked, a reassuringly Scottish tinge to his voice. He had short dark hair, including a lot of it on his chest, and fresh scars and bruises all over. 

James had never seen someone so muscular and so beat up. He stared. 

The man smiled down at him. “Hard to think she’d agree to be with a man like me, isn’t it?” he said. “But she saved my life, you know. Get you a girl who will kill for you, lad.” 

With those last words, he waded into the surf, wincing at the salt in his wounds, and pulled the woman into a kiss. 

They were beautiful, locked together in the sea, and James left after a moment, feeling as though he were intruding on something private.

Maybe, if he asked nicely, one of the attendants would slice him an avocado pear. 

***

2) 

Ten years later, James was in the Alps. Hannes Oberhauser was teaching him skiing, and also (secretly, but James wasn’t stupid) trying to help him figure out how to get on with life after the death of his parents. Both were processes that Aunt Charmian, so reserved and practical in nature, had struggled to convey to him. Mostly she just ended up looking like a cold old cow, Bond thought moodily, even though deep down he knew she’d been through the war and she just experienced her grief differently. 

Maybe he would understand someday. 

He made friends with a girl at the nearby clinic while he was there, a woman in her twenties who taught him to ice-skate and laughed at his stupid puns. She never let him feel like anything but a younger brother, of course, but that was better than trying to mother him. 

Anyway, she was in love with someone already—another James, gallingly enough. She wrote him letters and told James about how much he had impressed her father, who was some big crime boss. 

“You must have a strong spine, James, and don’t be afraid to joke, even when you are in front of powerful men,” she told him once. “Also, knowing how to throw a knife will always be useful.” 

They practiced together, throwing knives at frozen tree trunks, always in secret so her minders at the clinic wouldn’t fret. 

The last time he saw her was on New Year’s Eve at the rink. One moment they were about to sing Auld Lang Syne, the next Tracy was sprinting across the ice, skidding to a stop in front of a dark-haired man who looked like he was about to collapse. Drunk? No—exhausted, maybe injured from the concerned look on Tracy’s face as she spoke with him. And from the light in her eyes, this could only be one man. 

James made to go to them, but then his hands were gripped on the right and left and the song started up, “ _Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?_ ” 

Tracy and her James mixed in with the crowd after the song ended and he never saw either of them again. 

***

3) 

The horrid thing was, James wasn’t even meant to be on the submarine. Only he’d bucked up against a bully of a commanding officer, and said officer had decided that James obviously needed some below-seas training before he was fit to board a ship again, and somehow he’d squared it all away with the brass. 

Submarine life was bizarre and cramped, trapped as they were in the dark of the ocean with 115 other men. And that was before an anarchist captured them along with one of their Soviet counterparts. 

From the submarine, James learned to be quick and quiet, to read radar, to earn the respect of the other men without saying a word, and that doing as Tracy said, being ready with a pun, could diffuse tension in a way that judo-throwing someone over his hip and into five other people certainly didn’t.

From their time in captivity with the Russians, he learned all the swears that were common in Moscow, how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘fuck you’ in four different ways, that poker was a universal language, how to hold his tongue until he was fed, and how to help keep 114 men alive and motivated in a desperate situation. 

Stromberg’s men weren’t cruel, he was told; they were lucky. 

The bruises on his new friend Valentin’s face were lucky. The death of his commanding officer was lucky. 

The capture of a man code-named 007 along with an American submarine actually _was_ lucky, because 007 ended up leading a charge against their captors and James was finally able to give it to them just as he had wanted to for so long. And if 007 also destroyed the British and Soviet submarines in the line of duty, well, James wasn’t going to complain about saying goodbye to the old tin can. 

Luckily, the American sub was big enough to hold them all. 

Luck, luck, luck. She was a cruel mistress. As soon as they got back to the surface, James was going to show her that he could make his own luck. 

***

4) 

His quick behavior on the sub had been reported and now there was talk of “potential,” which was talk that James had heard all his life and had learned to despise. In this case it seemed to be useful, though, because the submarine days were gone. The brass had him learning Asian languages at Oxford and practicing his judo with someone who knew what they were doing. 

He got to take other, more interesting classes too, some of them with SBS recruits, some of them with military police. Interrogation. Infiltration. Combat survival. Combat survival was a bitch, but it was a bitch that got its arse handed to it. 

The plan was to station him in Hong Kong before the handover, he thought. Or maybe this was part of some special new training circuit, the ‘modern naval recruit.’ He wasn’t sure. 

Whatever the men at the top had planned, the upside was that nobody objected when he wrangled himself an invitation to a parachute training. 

The man who led the training introduced himself as James. Cool as a cucumber and dressed in a dark suit, he might have been military before, but he was clearly something else now. His windswept brown hair and devil-may-care green eyes made James wonder about what they might have gotten up to together if they’d both managed to meet in the kind of bar that no one talked about. 

Unfortunately, although those green eyes had flicked over him promisingly, the man had noted that he was teaching the course as a “side gig” because he needed some extra money for a honeymoon. Although he said it was for a friend, his brief, besotted smile made everything clear. 

Following introductions and instructions, the man smiled rather ruthlessly and charmed them into and out of the plane. When he leaped out of it, the last one behind James, he whooped with delight, and when he hit the ground he also hit his stride perfectly. 

Parachuting, he told them, was serious business. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be fun. 

James thought that was probably true about a lot of the things they were teaching him, things that should probably be terrifying but were mostly exhilarating. 

5) 

The Navy gave him a bullshit designation for his record, but he was really a fixer. Sometimes sending in the military police was a tricky business. Sometimes a certain level of deniability and flexibility was needed. Sometimes there was clearly something shady going on and certain people needed to resign before it could all be put to bed. In those cases, they transferred James into a posting that became mysteriously available and instructed him to investigate and to persuade. _Quietly._

Most of his posts didn’t end up quiet, but that was never because he wasn’t doing his job and usually because by the time a problem came to him, he had to set right some serious shite. His superiors kept promoting him up the ladder. He was almost certain that this was because when he got promoted, he magically became someone else’s problem. 

He had just finished dealing with a smuggling operation on the _HMS Chester_ when Admiral Roebuck ordered them to fire on the nearby arms bazaar despite the fact that one of MI6′s scouts was still in it. He wasn’t in a position to stop the trigger, but codename “White Knight” managed to escape the missile and land a plane with a nuclear payload nearby, averting the disastrous consequences of an impulsive decision by an utter twat. 

Not for the first time, James wondered why the hell he’d chosen to work for these people. 

They wanted to fly James back to London that very day, and at the gate he saw him. White Knight—it had to be. Something about the way he walked and held himself, the muscles beneath the suit, said that here was a man who was ready to commit violence… Also, he had a gun under his jacket and he still smelled like gunpowder. It was a bit of a give-away. 

James approached, introduced himself, apologized for the cock-up, and asked if he could buy the man a drink while they waited for their flight. 

The man’s eyes looked him up and down. 

James resisted the urge to get into parade rest. He might be younger by several years, but his experience was nothing to be ashamed of, and physically he had muscle mass thoroughly on his side. 

The man smiled, stood, and walked with him. 

“Double-oh seven,” the man said at the bar, introducing himself. “And there’s always a cock-up. I’m sure you’ve seen it all before.” He sipped his scotch and raised an inquiring eyebrow. 

James recognized an information-gathering tactic when he heard one, but he didn’t see why he couldn’t tell one of their own a bit about his job. He got only a few sentences in before Seven started laughing gently. 

“It’s not you, it’s just, I used to have your job,” Seven said, shaking his head. “I was Royal Navy too, for a while. And then I joined the big leagues, as one of my American friends likes to say.” 

“And do you recommend the big leagues?” James asked, not sure if he’d have liked to be in Seven’s position today. 

Seven grinned, bright and fierce, and leaned forward. “You’re starting to get tired of being bossed around by idiots and cleaning up their messes,” he said. “You’re starting to wonder if all of the small, petty grievances and stupid, violent crimes will ever end. They won’t. But you can put yourself in a position where the work you’re doing will matter more. Where the problems you’re solving will be bigger. Where sometimes there’s a trigger to be pulled and you’ll be the one who decides whether or not to pull it. And in that job, you’ll answer to a woman who is frankly terrifying and a better leader than any Naval officer I’ve been under.” 

Seven leaned back. “Do I recommend it?” He rubbed at his chin. “If you can survive it, yes. But it’s tough to survive it.” He gave James a thoughtful look. “You’ll want to get your pilot’s license before you apply, for one thing.” 

James didn’t both denying his intention. Instead he said, “We’d best sleep together before we’re coworkers, then, hadn’t we?” 

Seven’s hot eyes met his and Seven smiled again. “I hoped you’d say that,” he said. 

They flew on the same plane, James in economy and Seven in first class. Once in London, they got a hotel and spent a naked night together. Seven had a scarred chest that rang a faint bell, made James think of Jamaica for some reason, and he slipped out the next morning before James woke up, paying the tab behind him. 

James didn’t see him again, but he received a bottle of scotch in the mail after he earned his pilot’s license, and he heard all about him at Six. Double-oh-seven this, Double-oh-seven that… Seven seemed larger than life. 

And then he died. 

+1) 

6) “007,” M said, and then she was off, already haranguing him about Mollaka in that embassy in Madagascar. Much more than after his second kill in Prague, Bond felt himself stepping into the footsteps of all those agents who had gone before him. He felt that, and he knew that in M’s eyes, he wasn’t measuring up. 

“If you can survive it,” the old one had told him. 

He had. He would. And he would get the job done doing it. Again and again, until he didn’t. 

But he wasn’t a gun, a knife, a curled fist for M to wield—no, he was a wrecking ball, a blunt instrument. And he was going to leave a bigger footprint than any of them. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3 Constructive criticism is welcome.


End file.
